Both The Right And The Left Are Making Mutually Assured Destruction A Reality

Now that the Trump junta has sundered the transatlantic alliance, Germany’s new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, proposes forming a new “nuclear umbrella” for Europe with Britain and France. With AfD Nazis waiting in the wings, we may get the answer to the perennial question, what if Hitler had nuclear weapons?

Even leading progressives in the UK are beating the “European defense” drum, describing the United States as the enemy and calling for “rearmament that begins with complete abandonment of our existing weapons and communications systems.”

Clearly it isn’t just right-wing extremists that threaten the world. The left has lost its mind as well.

That conclusion is inescapable from the number of otherwise rational commentators in Europe that are panicking over the end of the American-led international order.

Leading lights of the left, like George Monbiot, author of “Manifesto For a New World Order,” aren’t content to make their usual rich-vs-poor economic exhortations, but are indulging a disturbing underlying mindset by imagining an additional enemy scenario – Britain and Europe vs. America.

Taking at once an Imperial Britain and Little England stance, Monbiot seriously asks: “Which of our weapons systems could achieve battle-readiness without US involvement and consent? Which could be remotely disabled by the US military?”

Lest he leave any doubt that the madness of the right has also infected the left, he throws out this rhetorical bon mot: “If the US is now our enemy, the enemy is inside the gate.”

Someone needs to remind such people, who seem to be trying to outdo Kissinger with their realpolitik, that the UK and France are nuclear powers. How much more insecure is Britain, Europe and the world “if the US is now our enemy?”

It’s incredibly obtuse for any supposedly thinking person to write, “In reality, our entanglement presents a major threat to national security,” when, in reality, national security presents a major threat to our entanglement in an inextricably interconnected world.

The nationalistic and “defense” mentality coming out of Europe is almost as disturbing as the crap spewing forth from Trump’s mouth and sharpie. At least with Trump, you expect stupidity and fearmongering. What excuse do liberals and progressives have for being so thick and xenophobic?

This isn’t leadership; it’s followership. This isn’t a “new world order;” it’s the same old disorder extended and intensified.

As reported, Merz, “the lifelong Atlanticist, was frank after his election victory: NATO is on the brink, and Germany must reassess its core beliefs on defense.”

It’s about time, though I doubt Germany, Britain or France will do anything but double down on a WWII/Cold War mindset.

NATO should have been dissolved during President Clinton’s first term. Instead it was expanded, without purpose or provocation, throughout the ‘90’s, thereby becoming complicit in the war against Ukraine. Now the Europeans are in a panic as the United States abandons its old allies and Trump slobbers over Putin.

As Ukrainian Oleksandr Mykhed, the author of “The Language of War” recently wrote, “If during the first term of Trump’s presidency we talked of the post-truth era, now we find ourselves in a world in which the truth is taken out, tortured and shot. This means that there will be no justice. This means that anything goes.”

The terrible truth for Ukrainians is that their sacrifice and suffering have become an annoyance in an indifferent world. Comfortable people don’t want to be disturbed, and certainly don’t want to face the horror of a calculated war started by a heartless dictator.

“I just want peace,” Trump repeats, as if he cares about the butchery and anguish Ukraine anymore than he cares about the butchery and anguish in Gaza. In mentally painting over the rubble of Gaza in the pastels of an imaginary new Riviera, Trump shows he’s as heartless and soulless as Putin.

Though there is no equivalence with the fascists in power in the US and Russia, it’s also imaginary for commentators and academics on the left to look through the warped lens of “national security” and see a new American enemy, envisioning the world in terms of “an axis of autocracy, facilitating an imperial war of aggression, confronting nations committed to democracy and international law.”

“Thought leaders” who spout such blather aren’t just setting themselves up; they’re setting everyone up. What happens when their worldview helps usher in Marine Le Pen as French president in 2027, and when the AfD wins the German elections in 2029, and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK overtakes the Conservatives in Britain?

Rather than pause and deeply reflect on the roots of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), as well as war itself, the world’s shallow “legacy media” accepts “national security,” and ever more destructive and costly weapons for “defense,” as a given. It’s utterly irresponsible.

In a global society, increasingly undifferentiated economically and psychologically, will it really take the use of nuclear weapons again to expose the filthy roots of war, which lie in the tribalism of “national security?”

There is no such fucking thing as national security, and the more political, media and academic leaders adhere to it, the more insecure they help make us all.

Martin LeFevre: lefevremartin77@gmail

Link:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/27/britain-defend-itself-us-military

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